Tag: seo

The meta title and description are two of the most important pieces of “metadata”—data not shown directly on the webpage, but instead used primarily by search engines to fit the page into the rest of the internet—both because they are important for SEO and because your prospects and customers will actually see them. Here’s how to write good ones.

What is the SERP?

SERP is an acronym for Search Engine Results Page. It’s what you see after you search for anything in any search engine. It’s the “ten blue links” which Google has more recently spruced up with differently-formatted features such as featured snippets. (Really, us SEOs only care about Google, so you’ll see me mentioning a lot of Google-specific features in these marketing posts. Google does take up an absolutely ridiculous amount of the search engine market share, which is no surprise, since it does a much better job than any other search engine at answering user queries.)

An example of a SERP with a knowledge panel and a People Also Ask box.

The meta title and description show up directly on the SERP. In the image above, the link “Featured snippets in search – Search Console Help – Google Help” is that page’s meta title. The piece of descriptive text below the link and the URL is the meta description: “When a user asks a question in Google Search, we might show a search result in a special featured snippet block at the top of the search results page.”

Meta titles also show up in the browser tab:

And meta titles and descriptions show up in link previews in applications like Slack:

Writing Meta Titles and Descriptions

For both meta titles and descriptions, you have a character limit. Additional characters beyond the limit are cut off with an ellipsis. For the title, a good rule of thumb is 65 characters total, including spaces. For the description, you’ll frequently only see about 120 or so characters on the SERP, but there are two major exceptions: sometimes, Google will show more of the meta descriptions for higher-ranking results, and further, link previews show a lot more of the description. As such, try for 320 characters, and go enough over that to finish the last sentence.

Your meta title is a decent ranking factor, so you’ll want a core keyword in the title, but the meta description is much less so. On the whole, the best way to write this metadata is not to pack them full of keywords. Contrarily, think of them as your website’s highway billboard.

People look at highway billboards for about a second before deciding whether or not to care. People also look at your search result for about a second before deciding whether or not to click. So, write your title and meta description like a highway billboard. Give people a punchy, intriguing title and back it up with your best marketing copy for your meta description, especially for the first 120 or so characters, which is the shortest amount that Google will show on the SERP. Of course you should include keywords so that people know what your page is about, but you should focus on writing good copy, not on the keywords.

Even if you magically ascend to position #1 on the SERP, if your meta title and description don’t look interesting to searchers, they aren’t going to click your result. Conversely, an intriguing meta title and description can make people click on you instead of your search competitors, even if they might be a few positions above you. Given the importance of these pieces of metadata to searchers, it shouldn’t even matter if Google uses them as a ranking factor. The end goal isn’t to rank #1, after all. The end goal is more money in the bank.

I was sick half of this week, which makes it a bit difficult to pass any significant judgement, but it seems to me that I’ve done pretty well at doing what I wanted to do last week, both in and out of work. I feel like I’m steadily reconciling with my boss, figuring out how he wants me to work for him and working that way. I’m still working on it, but it seems he dislikes me less now, and our weekly 1:1 exclusively contained discussions of projects, instead of its previous status quo of being mostly about the behaviors of mine that he disliked.

I’m also improving at my proper job description. I’m learning how to do a number of things, including link building and SEO article writing, with decent efficiency and correctness of technique. The biggest thing I’ve learned about SEO is that you always have way more data than you can or should try to make sense of, so you absolutely need to winnow it down before trying to work with it, since otherwise you end up going down time-consuming rabbit holes doing things which are not optimally efficient.

The most notable out-of-work things I’ve done this week are completing the move into my permanent residence, signing an Official Adult Lease™, and purchasing a bed, which isn’t that big a deal in the scheme of things but just feels like an Adult thing to do. Staying in a community center for a month was incredibly fun, but it also made me feel a bit like I didn’t have a home. Now, I feel more like I live in California.

My biggest current problem is optimization of time. Now that I’m no longer spending most of my non-working time hyper-analyzing past interactions with my boss to figure out what I’m doing wrong, I have time to do other stuff, but I need to understand what that other stuff should be. Possible candidates for top priority slots include, but are not limited to, resuming work on my tech projects, updating the websites I’ve made using what I now know about SEO, documenting some of the cool and important stuff I’ve learned about SEO from the standpoint of a beginner getting started, doing research on our current clients and learning tons of stuff about especially the tech-focused ones so I open avenues to potentially transition into working for them after I’m done working here, continuing to work on marketing certifications, re-starting work on tech certifications, reading books on business, and going to the community center I used to live at for purposes of networking.

Still, I’m optimistic. It’s very nice that we’ve made good enough financial choices that we don’t have to worry too much about money, even though we’re effectively paying twice the usual rent because we needed to put down a security deposit. I forgot to eat breakfast before I left this morning and I was able to buy myself pancakes at a cafe near work. It’s nice to have a place to call home, though I’m still working on thinking of it that way. (A definition of “home” that’s heretofore been static for thirteen years kinda does that.) And as with every week here, I’ve been meeting and hanging out with tons of interesting people.

This job is getting very difficult, but not for the reasons you might expect. Yes, marketing is itself hard, but it’s actually been harder acclimating to the work environment. Not just the startup environment, though that definitely contributes, but my interactions with the people there. I made a few stupid social mistakes early on, and I have a few personality clashes with my direct supervisor which I need to work on.

Some of the most important things I’ve learned from this job so far, then, have actually been about how to work through such problems. I am learning a ton about marketing, because my supervisor is ridiculously good at what he does. But I could have learned marketing from any expert marketer: having an expert marketer that I don’t naturally get along with very well is an additional level of challenge, and I’m learning a lot about the social rules of the white-collar workplace as a result.

I would be lying to say it’s all sunshine and roses: actually, I seem to have brought a rare rainstorm to sunny San Francisco. But like the umbrella that snapped in half on the first day after I moved here and left me to walk soaking wet for miles, these difficulties are teaching me perseverance, as well as the importance of having a good umbrella.

As to the actual marketing work, it’s incredibly interesting. I never realized SEO could be so complicated: the last time I checked, keyword stuffing and cloaking were frequently-used tactics. Now, it’s all about knowing your audience and getting voluntary backlinks from reputable sites.

One of my recent projects I’ve been working on for a handful of clients is that latter, we call it “link building”. This encompasses many things, from posting useful answers on forums to giving helpful information to reporters, but what I’m currently working on is getting links from individual peoples’ blogs. Basically, the process is that I figure out some people who blog about the thing our client does, and I see if there’s a place on their blog where they’d improve their content by linking to our client. Then, I send an outreach email, asking for the link.

Outside of work, my life is less difficult and more surreal. Living with rationalists, I keep having very interesting conversations. Interesting, both in the sense of intriguing and strange. People here regularly use phrases like “terminal value”, “cached thought”, “operational definition”, and “cognitive dissonance”. Everyone knows the ANI/AGI/ASI distinction. I have only met one other person who is not currently working as a programmer. And yet, we have these discussions laying about on couches, playing stupid card games, and drinking wine out of boxes. I went for cheap Chinese with some dude who works for Google.

Since I’m living in a community center until I can move into my permanent residence, there are all sorts of people and events which come through here. I’ve learned about the YIMBY movement, about animal rights activism and the clinically proven benefits of meditation. It’s so interesting learning about so many different points of view and political movements that I’d never heard of in any great detail before.

California has, in general, been a healing force for me, mostly due to one of the first friends I made here. No later than two hours after landing in CA, I met an absolute ray of sunshine who helped me through the rain, and continues to do so. He’s made awesome, healthy food that I’ve been able to take in for lunch sometimes, led some of the best meditation sessions I’ve ever attended, and generically made the whole environment and experience very positive. We’re both moving out of the community center soon, but I very much hope we can stay in touch after we’re no longer housemates. This friend, along with my fiancé and my mom, have been my umbrella.